Introduction
Oil painting originated in northern Europe in the 15th century, and its stability, textural variety, and slow-drying nature that enabled artists to work on a painting over a period of days, meant that by the 16th century, it had become the favorite medium of artists all over Europe. The paint could be thinned with turpentine and oil to give it great translucency, while at the same time achieving the deep, rich colors that both pleased wealthy patrons wanting to be portrayed in all their rich finery and imbued religious and secular subjects with depth and sensuousness.
Oil has been used in this most famous of 15th-century portraits, though there may be egg tempera in the underpainting. With this new medium, van Eyck achieved an extraordinary range of tones, with deep shadows and clear bright lights.
Oil paint is also delicious for the artist to handle. It has great plasticity, which means it can be molded into many different textures, and even when it is applied thinly, it possesses a pleasing body and malleability. This is because of the oil with which the pigments are premixed in the tubes and also the oil in the painting medium, with which the paints are mixed on the palette before the brush is put to clay.
It allows patient, subtle work with a fine brush, or, depending on the artist’s temperament and intentions, vigorous applications with a knife to plaster it thickly on the support. Of all media, it allows for the greatest versatility of technique, but is also capable of throwing up chance effects, which add to the magic of using it and encourage the development of the artist.
The Development of Paint
The development of oil paint as the most common medium for painting in Europe evolved slowly in the fifteenth century. Before this, a popular medium for painting on panel had been egg tempera, but it did not have the flexibility of pigments bound with a drying oil. Oil paint also had the capacity to be blended and manipulated on the surface of the painting, and its transparency allowed for a far greater range of tones and resonant colors.
The transition from egg tempera to oil paint in Northern Europe, and then in Italy toward the end of the fifteenth century, produced many examples of paintings in which the preliminary work was done in egg tempera, while later stages, such as thin transparent glazes, were applied in oil color. There are also examples of works in which egg and oil are contained in the same layer.
Although the Dutch van Eyck brothers are popularly credited with the discovery of oil painting in the early fifteenth century – Jan van Eyck (b. before 1395-1441) made progress developing the oil medium and using glazes – the use of oil-resin varnishes and drying oils is in fact quite well documented since the eighth century. Painters in Italy began to copy the Netherlandish way of modeling the underpainting in opaque colors, and then applying rich transparent glazes.
The progress of oil paint Fifteenth-century Italy saw artists such as Piero della Francesca (1410/20-1492), whose early work is predominantly in egg tempera, coming to terms with the new oil medium. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini (c.1430-1516) began to exploit the depth and richness of tone and color that could be had with oil.
Oil has been used in this most famous of 15th-century portraits, though there may be egg tempera in the underpainting. With this new medium, van Eyck achieved an extraordinary range of tones, with deep shadows and clear bright lights.
He often worked first on an egg tempera underpainting, with its characteristic cross-hatched modeling, but the use of oil in the later stages of painting gave his figures an almost tangible existence. Perugino (c. 1445/50-1523) and Raphael (1483- 1520) were among other artists of the time working in both media. Raphael sustained the purity of the whites and blues in his skies by using the less yellowing walnut oil as a binding medium, rather than the linseed oil he used with other colors.
By the first decade of the sixteenth century, oil paint had become universally established as the prime painting medium in Italy. It is with later Venetian painters, such as Titian (c.1487/90-1576), and then Tintoretto (1518-94), that we see a freeing up of composition and expression. That these artists were now using oil paint exclusively had much to do with this new freedom of expression, for its flexibility allowed them to take a looser approach, not only in initial stages, but throughout the whole painting process.
This painting shows Titian moving toward the very loose style of his last paintings, where fluidly modeled forms in opaque colors are overpainted in transparent glazes. The work is alive with movement, with the turbulent figure of Europa echoed in the twisting figures above
Economical painting
By the seventeenth century, it was common for painters to work in an economical style on a colored surface that provided the mid-tones, while opaque colors were added for lights, and thin transparent darks for shadows. Artists as diverse in style as Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Velasquez (1599-1660) used these dark “grounds” to emphasize any areas of high contrast and create dramatic lighting effects.
Rembrandt (1606-69) often used double grounds on his canvases, with an underlayer of red bole (clay), or red ochre and a layer of gray or brown on top. His images often seem to be sculpted in relief out of the dark ground. Rubens (1577-1640) worked similarly, but often prepared a warm yellow-brown layer that he applied with a bristle brush over a white priming.
This underlayer helped him to create images more freely, giving more expression to his painting style.
Unusual additions
Oil paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries reveal some complex layer structures – and can include complicated materials. The British artist George Stubbs (1724-1806) used wax-resin mixtures with a drying oil in certain works. Some artists used what are now recognized as unstable materials; Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), for instance, incorporated oil, resin, and bitumen mixtures into his paintings. Gainsborough (1727-88), on the other hand, generally painted fairly thinly, with a drying oil plus pigment mixtures thinned with a solvent.
Research on paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is limited, but what we can learn from the state of many works in this period is that the more straightforward the painting techniques and materials are, the more reliable the results
Oil paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries reveal some complex layer structures – and can include complicated materials. The British artist George Stubbs (1724-1806) used wax-resin mixtures with a drying oil in certain works. Some artists used what are now recognized as unstable materials; Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), for instance, incorporated oil, resin, and bitumen mixtures into his paintings. Gainsborough (1727-88), on the other hand, generally painted fairly thinly, with a drying oil plus pigment mixtures thinned with a solvent.
Research on paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is limited, but what we can learn from the state of many works in this period is that the more straightforward the painting techniques and materials are, the more reliable the results.
A change of direction
During the nineteenth century, many artists rejected the constraints of traditional academic practices and moved toward “plein-air” landscape painting from nature. This, combined with new ideas about color and the discovery and development of new pigments, led to the new movement known as Impressionism.
Artists such as Monet (1840-1926) and Renoir (1841-1919) made paintings that were often no less complex than oil paintings of the past, but were characterized by a sense of freshness and immediacy that was quite new. Now the character and texture of the individual brushstroke was integral to the look of the work. Color became a focus of painting as never before, with new pigments available to artists and a greater use of bright, saturated primaries and secondaries.
The change in attitude and new approach to oil painting that was first initiated by the Impressionists led to further reevaluations during for a diversity of painting styles, its position at the forefront of painting media has been reinforced in the twentieth century.
The German artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has considered the relationship between painting and photography. His 1960s monochromatic paintings, based on newspaper photographs, exploited the way oil color could be blended. He found a correlation between oil techniques and the smooth, often blurred quality of photographs.
During the most recent decades, many artists have found distinctive ways of working with this painting medium to give us new insights and meanings. Works by the Italian artists Francesco Clemente (b. 1952), Enzo Cucchi (b. 1949), and Mimmo Paladino (b. 1948), although personal and individualistic, give expression to universal needs and aspirations.
The cool, powerful works of British artist Lucien Freud (b. 1922) demonstrate the impact and intensity that can be achieved by painting directly from life, while the less direct approach of Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932) to his subjects has resulted in forceful works controlled by strong, energetic color. Paintings by artists such as Christopher Lebrun (b. 1951) appear to draw on myths and images from the past, but they remain utterly contemporary in their engagement with surface, texture, and color.
In the US and elsewhere in the world, a number of artists have begun to find inspiration in new forms of abstraction that still draw on the same techniques and traditions used for over five hundred years.
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